Chapter 12
After taking leave of her guests, Anna did not sit down,
but began walking up and down the room. She had
unconsciously the whole evening done her utmost to
arouse in Levin a feeling of love—as of late she had fallen
into doing with all young men— and she knew she had
attained her aim, as far as was possible in one evening,
with a married and conscientious man. She liked him
indeed extremely, and, in spite of the striking difference,
from the masculine point of view, between Vronsky and
Levin, as a woman she saw something they had in
common, which had made Kitty able to love both. Yet as
soon as he was out of the room, she ceased to think of
him.
One thought, and one only, pursued her in different
forms, and refused to be shaken off. ‘If I have so much
effect on others, on this man, who loves his home and his
wife, why is it he is so cold to me?...not cold exactly, he
loves me, I know that! But something new is drawing us
apart now. Why wasn’t he here all the evening? He told
Stiva to say he could not leave Yashvin, and must watch
over his play. Is Yashvin a child? But supposing it’s true.
He never tells a lie. But there’s something else in it if it’s
true. He is glad of an opportunity of showing me that he
has other duties; I know that, I submit to that. But why
prove that to me? He wants to show me that his love for
me is not to interfere with his freedom. But I need no
proofs, I need love. He ought to understand all the
bitterness of this life for me here in Moscow. Is this life? I
am not living, but waiting for an event, which is
continually put off and put off. No answer again! And
Stiva says he cannot go to Alexey Alexandrovitch. And I
can’t write again. I can do nothing, can begin nothing, can
alter nothing; I hold myself in, I wait, inventing
amusements for myself—the English family, writing,
reading—but it’s all nothing but a sham, it’s all the same as
morphine. He ought to feel for me,’ she said, feeling tears
of self-pity coming into her eyes.
She heard Vronsky’s abrupt ring and hurriedly dried
her tears— not only dried her tears, but sat down by a
lamp and opened a book, affecting composure. She
wanted to show him that she was displeased that he had
not come home as he had promised— displeased only, and
not on any account to let him see her distress, and least of
all, her self-pity. She might pity herself, but he must not
pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for
wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an
attitude of antagonism.
‘Well, you’ve not been dull?’ he said, eagerly and
good-humoredly, going up to her. ‘What a terrible passion
it is—gambling!’
‘No, I’ve not been dull; I’ve learned long ago not to be
dull. Stiva has been here and Levin.’
‘Yes, they meant to come and see you. Well, how did
you like Levin?’ he said, sitting down beside her.
‘Very much. They have not long been gone. What was
Yashvin doing?’
‘He was winning—seventeen thousand. I got him
away. He had really started home, but he went back again,
and now he’s losing.’
‘Then what did you stay for?’ she asked, suddenly
lifting her eyes to him. The expression of her face was
cold and ungracious. ‘You told Stiva you were staying on
to get Yashvin away. And you have left him there.’
The same expression of cold readiness for the conflict
appeared on his face too.
‘In the first place, I did not ask him to give you any
message; and secondly, I never tell lies. But what’s the
chief point, I wanted to stay, and I stayed,’ he said,
frowning. ‘Anna, what is it for, why will you?’ he said
after a moment’s silence, bending over towards her, and
he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it.
She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some
strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to
her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not
permit her to surrender.
‘Of course you wanted to stay, and you stayed. You do
everything you want to. But what do you tell me that for?
With what object?’ she said, getting more and more
excited. ‘Does anyone contest your rights? But you want
to be right, and you’re welcome to be right.’
His hand closed, he turned away, and his face wore a
still more obstinate expression.
‘For you it’s a matter of obstinacy,’ she said, watching
him intently and suddenly finding the right word for that
expression that irritated her, ‘simply obstinacy. For you it’s
a question of whether you keep the upper hand of me,
while for me....’ Again she felt sorry for herself, and she
almost burst into tears. ‘If you knew what it is for me!
When I feel as I do now that you are hostile, yes, hostile
to me, if you knew what this means for me! If you knew
how I feel on the brink of calamity at this instant, how
afraid I am of myself!’ And she turned away, hiding her
sobs.
‘But what are you talking about?’ he said, horrified at
her expression of despair, and again bending over her, he
took her hand and kissed it. ‘What is it for? Do I seek
amusements outside our home? Don’t I avoid the society
of women?’
‘Well, yes! If that were all!’ she said.
‘Come, tell me what I ought to do to give you peace of
mind? I am ready to do anything to make you happy,’ he
said, touched by her expression of despair; ‘what wouldn’t
I do to save you from distress of any sort, as now, Anna!’
he said.
‘It’s nothing, nothing!’ she said. ‘I don’t know myself
whether it’s the solitary life, my nerves.... Come, don’t let
us talk of it. What about the race? You haven’t told me!’
she inquired, trying to conceal her triumph at the victory,
which had anyway been on her side.
He asked for supper, and began telling her about the
races; but in his tone, in his eyes, which became more and
more cold, she saw that he did not forgive her for her
victory, that the feeling of obstinacy with which she had
been struggling had asserted itself again in him. He was
colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his
surrender. And she, remembering the words that had
given her the victory, ‘how I feel on the brink of calamity,
how afraid I am of myself,’ saw that this weapon was a
dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second
time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them
together there had grown up between them some evil
spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and
still less from her own heart.
Chapter 13
There are no conditions to which a man cannot
become used, especially if he sees that all around him are
living in the same way. Levin could not have believed
three months before that he could have gone quietly to
sleep in the condition in which he was that day, that
leading an aimless irrational life, living too beyond his
means, after drinking to excess (he could not call what
happened at the club anything else), forming
inappropriately friendly relations with a man with whom
his wife had once been in love, and a still more
inappropriate call upon a woman who could only be
called a lost woman, after being fascinated by that woman
and causing his wife distress—he could still go quietly to
sleep. But under the influence of fatigue, a sleepless night,
and the wine he had drunk, his sleep was sound and
untroubled.
At five o’clock the creak of a door opening waked him.
He jumped up and looked round. Kitty was not in bed
beside him. But there was a light moving behind the
screen, and he heard her steps.
‘What is it?...what is it?’ he said, half-asleep. ‘Kitty!
What is it?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, coming from behind the screen
with a candle in her hand. ‘I felt unwell,’ she said, smiling
a particularly sweet and meaning smile.
‘What? has it begun?’ he said in terror. ‘We ought to
send...’ and hurriedly he reached after his clothes.
‘No, no,’ she said, smiling and holding his hand. ‘It’s
sure to be nothing. I was rather unwell, only a little. It’s all
over now.’
And getting into bed, she blew out the candle, lay
down and was still. Though he thought her stillness
suspicious, as though she were holding her breath, and still
more suspicious the expression of peculiar tenderness and
excitement with which, as she came from behind the
screen, she said ‘nothing,’ he was so sleepy that he fell
asleep at once. Only later he remembered the stillness of
her breathing, and understood all that must have been
passing in her sweet, precious heart while she lay beside
him, not stirring, in anticipation of the greatest event in a
woman’s life. At seven o’clock he was waked by the touch
of her hand on his shoulder, and a gentle whisper. She
seemed struggling between regret at waking him, and the
desire to talk to him.
‘Kostya, don’t be frightened. It’s all right. But I fancy....
We ought to send for Lizaveta Petrovna.’
The candle was lighted again. She was sitting up in bed,
holding some knitting, which she had been busy upon
during the last few days.
‘Please, don’t be frightened, it’s all right. I’m not a bit
afraid,’ she said, seeing his scared face, and she pressed his
hand to her bosom and then to her lips.
He hurriedly jumped up, hardly awake, and kept his
eyes fixed on her, as he put on his dressing gown; then he
stopped, still looking at her. He had to go, but he could
not tear himself from her eyes. He thought he loved her
face, knew her expression, her eyes, but never had he seen
it like this. How hateful and horrible he seemed to
himself, thinking of the distress he had caused her
yesterday. Her flushed face, fringed with soft curling hair
under her night cap, was radiant with joy and courage.
Though there was so little that was complex or artificial
in Kitty’s character in general, Levin was struck by what
was revealed now, when suddenly all disguises were
thrown off and the very kernel of her soul shone in her
eyes. And in this simplicity and nakedness of her soul, she,
the very woman he loved in her, was more manifest than
ever. She looked at him, smiling; but all at once her brows
twitched, she threw up her head, and going quickly up to
him, clutched his hand and pressed close up to him,
breathing her hot breath upon him. She was in pain and
was, as it were, complaining to him of her suffering. And
for the first minute, from habit, it seemed to him that he
was to blame. But in her eyes there was a tenderness that
told him that she was far from reproaching him, that she
loved him for her sufferings. ‘If not I, who is to blame for
it?’ he thought unconsciously, seeking someone
responsible for this suffering for him to punish; but there
was no one responsible. She was suffering, complaining,
and triumphing in her sufferings, and rejoicing in them,
and loving them. He saw that something sublime was
being accomplished in her soul, but what? He could not
make it out. It was beyond his understanding.
‘I have sent to mamma. You go quickly to fetch
Lizaveta Petrovna ...Kostya!... Nothing, it’s over.’
She moved away from him and rang the bell.
‘Well, go now; Pasha’s coming. I am all right.’
And Levin saw with astonishment that she had taken
up the knitting she had brought in in the night and begun
working at it again.
As Levin was going out of one door, he heard the
maid-servant come in at the other. He stood at the door
and heard Kitty giving exact directions to the maid, and
beginning to help her move the bedstead.
He dressed, and while they were putting in his horses,
as a hired sledge was not to be seen yet, he ran again up to
the bedroom, not on tiptoe, it seemed to him, but on
wings. Two maid-servants were carefully moving
something in the bedroom.
Kitty was walking about knitting rapidly and giving
directions.
‘I’m going for the doctor. They have sent for Lizaveta
Petrovna, but I’ll go on there too. Isn’t there anything
wanted? Yes, shall I go to Dolly’s?’
She looked at him, obviously not hearing what he was
saying.
‘Yes, yes. Do go,’ she said quickly, frowning and
waving her hand to him.
He had just gone into the drawing room, when
suddenly a plaintive moan sounded from the bedroom,
smothered instantly. He stood still, and for a long while he
could not understand.
‘Yes, that is she,’ he said to himself, and clutching at his
head he ran downstairs.
‘Lord have mercy on us! pardon us! aid us!’ he repeated
the words that for some reason came suddenly to his lips.
And he, an unbeliever, repeated these words not with his
lips only. At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even
the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he
was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his
turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like
dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose
hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?
The horse was not yet ready, but feeling a peculiar
concentration of his physical forces and his intellect on
what he had to do, he started off on foot without waiting
for the horse, and told Kouzma to overtake him.
At the corner he met a night cabman driving hurriedly.
In the little sledge, wrapped in a velvet cloak, sat Lizaveta
Petrovna with a kerchief round her head. ‘Thank God!
thank God!’ he said, overjoyed to recognize her little fair
face which wore a peculiarly serious, even stern
expression. Telling the driver not to stop, he ran along
beside her.
‘For two hours, then? Not more?’ she inquired. ‘You
should let Pyotr Dmitrievitch know, but don’t hurry him.
And get some opium at the chemist’s.’
‘So you think that it may go on well? Lord have mercy
on us and help us!’ Levin said, seeing his own horse
driving out of the gate. Jumping into the sledge beside
Konzma, he told him to drive to the doctor’s.
Chapter 14
The doctor was not yet up, and the footman said that
‘he had been up late, and had given orders not to be
waked, but would get up soon.’ The footman was
cleaning the lamp-chimneys, and seemed very busy about
them. This concentration of the footman upon his lamps,
and his indifference to what was passing in Levin, at first
astounded him, but immediately on considering the
question he realized that no one knew or was bound to
know his feelings, and that it was all the more necessary to
act calmly, sensibly, and resolutely to get through this wall
of indifference and attain his aim.
‘Don’t be in a hurry or let anything slip,’ Levin said to
himself, feeling a greater and greater flow of physical
energy and attention to all that lay before him to do.
Having ascertained that the doctor was not getting up,
Levin considered various plans, and decided on the
following one: that Konzma should go for another doctor,
while he himself should go to the chemist’s for opium,
and if when he came back the doctor had not yet begun to
get up, he would either by tipping the footman, or by
force, wake the doctor at all hazards.
At the chemist’s the lank shopman sealed up a packet of
powders for a coachman who stood waiting, and refused
him opium with the same callousness with which the
doctor’s footman had cleaned his lamp chimneys. Trying
not to get flurried or out of temper, Levin mentioned the
names of the doctor and midwife, and explaining what the
opium was needed for, tried to persuade him. The assistant
inquired in German whether he should give it, and
receiving an affirmative reply from behind the partition,
he took out a bottle and a funnel, deliberately poured the
opium from a bigger bottle into a little one, stuck on a
label, sealed it up, in spite of Levin’s request that he would
not do so, and was about to wrap it up too. This was more
than Levin could stand; he took the bottle firmly out of
his hands, and ran to the big glass doors. The doctor was
not even now getting up, and the footman, busy now in
putting down the rugs, refused to wake him. Levin
deliberately took out a ten rouble note, and, careful to
speak slowly, though losing no time over the business, he
handed him the note, and explained that Pyotr
Dmitrievitch (what a great and important personage he
seemed to Levin now, this Pyotr Dmitrievitch, who had
been of so little consequence in his eyes before!) had
promised to come at any time; that he would certainly not
be angry! and that he must therefore wake him at once.
The footman agreed, and went upstairs, taking Levin
into the waiting room.
Levin could hear through the door the doctor
coughing, moving about, washing, and saying something.
Three minutes passed; it seemed to Levin that more than
an hour had gone by. He could not wait any longer.
‘Pyotr Dmitrievitch, Pyotr Dmitrievitch!’ he said in an
imploring voice at the open door. ‘For God’s sake, forgive
me! See me as you are. It’s been going on more than two
hours already.’
‘I a minute; in a minute!’ answered a voice, and to his
amazement Levin heard that the doctor was smiling as he
spoke.
‘For one instant.’
‘In a minute.’
Two minutes more passed while the doctor was putting
on his boots, and two minutes more while the doctor put
on his coat and combed his hair.
‘Pyotr Dmitrievitch!’ Levin was beginning again in a
plaintive voice, just as the doctor came in dressed and
ready. ‘These people have no conscience,’ thought Levin.
‘Combing his hair, while we’re dying!’
‘Good morning!’ the doctor said to him, shaking hands,
and, as it were, teasing him with his composure. ‘There’s
no hurry. Well now?’
Trying to be as accurate as possible Levin began to tell
him every unnecessary detail of his wife’s condition,
interrupting his account repeatedly with entreaties that the
doctor would come with him at once.
‘Oh, you needn’t be in any hurry. You don’t
understand, you know. I’m certain I’m not wanted, still
I’ve promised, and if you like, I’ll come. But there’s no
hurry. Please sit down; won’t you have some coffee?’
Levin stared at him with eyes that asked whether he
was laughing at him; but the doctor had no notion of
making fun of him.
‘I know, I know,’ the doctor said, smiling; ‘I’m a
married man myself; and at these moments we husbands
are very much to be pitied. I’ve a patient whose husband
always takes refuge in the stables on such occasions.’
‘But what do you think, Pyotr Dmitrievitch? Do you
suppose it may go all right?’
‘Everything points to a favorable issue.’
‘So you’ll come immediately?’ said Levin, looking
wrathfully at the servant who was bringing in the coffee.
‘In an hour’s time.’
‘Oh, for mercy’s sake!’
‘Well, let me drink my coffee, anyway.’
The doctor started upon his coffee. Both were silent.
‘The Turks are really getting beaten, though. Did you
read yesterday’s telegrams?’ said the doctor, munching
some roll.
‘No, I can’t stand it!’ said Levin, jumping up. ‘So you’ll
be with us in a quarter of an hour.’
‘In half an hour.’
‘On your honor?’
When Levin got home, he drove up at the same time as
the princess, and they went up to the bedroom door
together. The princess had tears in her eyes, and her hands
were shaking. Seeing Levin, she embraced him, and burst
into tears.
‘Well, my dear Lizaveta Petrovna?’ she queried,
clasping the hand of the midwife, who came out to meet
them with a beaming and anxious face.
‘She’s going on well,’ she said; ‘persuade her to lie
down. She will be easier so.’
From the moment when he had waked up and
understood what was going on, Levin had prepared his
mind to bear resolutely what was before him, and without
considering or anticipating anything, to avoid upsetting his
wife, and on the contrary to soothe her and keep up her
courage. Without allowing himself even to think of what
was to come, of how it would end, judging from his
inquiries as to the usual duration of these ordeals, Levin
had in his imagination braced himself to bear up and to
keep a tight rein on his feelings for five hours, and it had
seemed to him he could do this. But when he came back
from the doctor’s and saw her sufferings again, he fell to
repeating more and more frequently: ‘Lord, have mercy
on us, and succor us!’ He sighed, and flung his head up,
and began to feel afraid he could not bear it, that he would
burst into tears or run away. Such agony it was to him.
And only one hour had passed.
But after that hour there passed another hour, two
hours, three, the full five hours he had fixed as the furthest
limit of his sufferings, and the position was still unchanged;
and he was still bearing it because there was nothing to be
done but bear it; every instant feeling that he had reached
the utmost limits of his endurance, and that his heart
would break with sympathy and pain.
But still the minutes passed by and the hours, and still
hours more, and his misery and horror grew and were
more and more intense.
All the ordinary conditions of life, without which one
can form no conception of anything, had ceased to exist
for Levin. He lost all sense of time. Minutes—those
minutes when she sent for him and he held her moist
hand, that would squeeze his hand with extraordinary
violence and then push it away—seemed to him hours,
and hours seemed to him minutes. He was surprised when
Lizaveta Petrovna asked him to light a candle behind a
screen, and he found that it was five o’clock in the
afternoon. If he had been told it was only ten o’clock in
the morning he would not have been more surprised.
Where he was all this time, he knew as little as the time of
anything. He saw her swollen face, sometimes bewildered
and in agony, sometimes smiling and trying to reassure
him. He saw the old princess too, flushed and
overwrought, with her gray curls in disorder, forcing
herself to gulp down her tears, biting her lips; he saw
Dolly too and the doctor, smoking fat cigarettes, and
Lizaveta Petrovna with a firm, resolute, reassuring face,
and the old prince walking up and down the hall with a
frowning face. But why they came in and went out,
where they were, he did not know. The princess was with
the doctor in the bedroom, then in the study, where a
table set for dinner suddenly appeared; then she was not
there, but Dolly was. Then Levin remembered he had
been sent somewhere. Once he had been sent to move a
table and sofa. He had done this eagerly, thinking it had to
be done for her sake, and only later on he found it was his
own bed he had been getting ready. Then he had been
sent to the study to ask the doctor something. The doctor
had answered and then had said something about the
irregularities in the municipal council. Then he had been
sent to the bedroom to help the old princess to move the
holy picture in its silver and gold setting, and with the
princess’s old waiting maid he had clambered on a shelf to
reach it and had broken the little lamp, and the old servant
had tried to reassure him about the lamp and about his
wife, and he carried the holy picture and set it at Kitty’s
head, carefully tucking it in behind the pillow. But where,
when, and why all this had happened, he could not tell.
He did not understand why the old princess took his hand,
and looking compassionately at him, begged him not to
worry himself, and Dolly persuaded him to eat something
and led him out of the room, and even the doctor looked
seriously and with commiseration at him and offered him a
drop of something.
All he knew and felt was that what was happening was
what had happened nearly a year before in the hotel of the
country town at the deathbed of his brother Nikolay. But
that had been grief— this was joy. Yet that grief and this
joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life;
they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life
through which there came glimpses of something sublime.
And in the contemplation of this sublime something the
soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had
before had no conception, while reason lagged behind,
unable to keep up with it.
‘Lord, have mercy on us, and succor us!’ he repeated to
himself incessantly, feeling, in spite of his long and, as it
seemed, complete alienation from religion, that he turned
to God just as trustfully and simply as he had in his
childhood and first youth.
All this time he had two distinct spiritual conditions.
One was away from her, with the doctor, who kept
smoking one fat cigarette after another and extinguishing
them on the edge of a full ash tray, with Dolly, and with
the old prince, where there was talk about dinner, about
politics, about Marya Petrovna’s illness, and where Levin
suddenly forgot for a minute what was happening, and felt
as though he had waked up from sleep; the other was in
her presence, at her pillow, where his heart seemed
breaking and still did not break from sympathetic
suffering, and he prayed to God without ceasing. And
every time he was brought back from a moment of
oblivion by a scream reaching him from the bedroom, he
fell into the same strange terror that had come upon him
the first minute. Every time he heard a shriek, he jumped
up, ran to justify himself, remembered on the way that he
was not to blame, and he longed to defend her, to help
her. But as he looked at her, he saw again that help was
impossible, and he was filled with terror and prayed:
‘Lord, have mercy on us, and help us!’ And as time went
on, both these conditions became more intense; the
calmer he became away from her, completely forgetting
her, the more agonizing became both her sufferings and
his feeling of helplessness before them. He jumped up,
would have liked to run away, but ran to her.
Sometimes, when again and again she called upon him,
he blamed her; but seeing her patient, smiling face, and
hearing the words, ‘I am worrying you,’ he threw the
blame on God; but thinking of God, at once he fell to
beseeching God to forgive him and have mercy.
Chapter 15
He did not know whether it was late or early. The
candles had all burned out. Dolly had just been in the
study and had suggested to the doctor that he should lie
down. Levin sat listening to the doctor’s stories of a quack
mesmerizer and looking at the ashes of his cigarette. There
had been a period of repose, and he had sunk into
oblivion. He had completely forgotten what was going on
now. He heard the doctor’s chat and understood it.
Suddenly there came an unearthly shriek. The shriek was
so awful that Levin did not even jump up, but holding his
breath, gazed in terrified inquiry at the doctor. The doctor
put his head on one side, listened, and smiled approvingly.
Everything was so extraordinary that nothing could strike
Levin as strange. ‘I suppose it must be so,’ he thought, and
still sat where he was. Whose scream was this? He jumped
up, ran on tiptoe to the bedroom, edged round Lizaveta
Petrovna and the princess, and took up his position at
Kitty’s pillow. The scream had subsided, but there was
some change now. What it was he did not see and did not
comprehend, and he had no wish to see or comprehend.
But he saw it by the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. Lizaveta
Petrovna’s face was stern and pale, and still as resolute,
though her jaws were twitching, and her eyes were fixed
intently on Kitty. Kitty’s swollen and agonized face, a tress
of hair clinging to her moist brow, was turned to him and
sought his eyes. Her lifted hands asked for his hands.
Clutching his chill hands in her moist ones, she began
squeezing them to her face.
‘Don’t go, don’t go! I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid!’ she
said rapidly. ‘Mamma, take my earrings. They bother me.
You’re not afraid? Quick, quick, Lizaveta Petrovna..’
She spoke quickly, very quickly, and tried to smile. But
suddenly her face was drawn, she pushed him away.
‘Oh, this is awful! I’m dying, I’m dying! Go away!’ she
shrieked, and again he heard that unearthly scream.
Levin clutched at his head and ran out of the room.
‘It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s all right,’ Dolly called
after him.
But they might say what they liked, he knew now that
all was over. He stood in the next room, his head leaning
against the door post, and heard shrieks, howls such as he
had never heard before, and he knew that what had been
Kitty was uttering these shrieks. He had long ago ceased to
wish for the child. By now he loathed this child. He did
not even wish for her life now, all he longed for was the
end of this awful anguish.
‘Doctor! what is it? What is it? By God!’ he said,
snatching at the doctor’s hand as he came up.
‘It’s the end,’ said the doctor. And the doctor’s face was
so grave as he said it that Levin took THE END as
meaning her death.
Beside himself, he ran into the bedroom. The first
thing he saw was the face of Lizaveta Petrovna. It was
even more frowning and stern. Kitty’s face he did not
know. In the place where it had been was something that
was fearful in its strained distortion and in the sounds that
came from it. He fell down with his head on the wooden
framework of the bed, feeling that his heart was bursting.
The awful scream never paused, it became still more
awful, and as though it had reached the utmost limit of
terror, suddenly it ceased. Levin could not believe his ears,
but there could be no doubt; the scream had ceased and
he heard a subdued stir and bustle, and hurried breathing,
and her voice, gasping, alive, tender, and blissful, uttered
softly, ‘It’s over!’
He lifted his head. With her hands hanging exhausted
on the quilt, looking extraordinarily lovely and serene, she
looked at him in silence and tried to smile, and could not.
And suddenly, from the mysterious and awful far-away
world in which he had been living for the last twenty-two
hours, Levin felt himself all in an instant borne back to the
old every-day world, glorified though now, by such a
radiance of happiness that he could not bear it. The
strained chords snapped, sobs and tears of joy which he
had never foreseen rose up with such violence that his
whole body shook, that for long they prevented him from
speaking.
Falling on his knees before the bed, he held his wife’s
hand before his lips and kissed it, and the hand, with a
weak movement of the fingers, responded to his kiss. And
meanwhile, there at the foot of the bed, in the deft hands
of Lizaveta Petrovna, like a flickering light in a lamp, lay
the life of a human creature, which had never existed
before, and which would now with the same right, with
the same importance to itself, live and create in its own
image.
‘Alive! alive! And a boy too! Set your mind at rest!’
Levin heard Lizaveta Petrovna saying, as she slapped the
baby’s back with a shaking hand.
‘Mamma, is it true?’ said Kitty’s voice.
The princess’s sobs were all the answers she could
make. And in the midst of the silence there came in
unmistakable reply to the mother’s question, a voice quite
unlike the subdued voices speaking in the room. It was the
bold, clamorous, self-assertive squall of the new human
being, who had so incomprehensibly appeared.
If Levin had been told before that Kitty was dead, and
that he had died with her, and that their children were
angels, and that God was standing before him, he would
have been surprised at nothing. But now, coming back to
the world of reality, he had to make great mental efforts to
take in that she was alive and well, and that the creature
squalling so desperately was his son. Kitty was alive, her
agony was over. And he was unutterably happy. That he
understood; he was completely happy in it. But the baby?
Whence, why, who was he?... He could not get used to
the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous,
superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.
Chapter 16
At ten o’clock the old prince, Sergey Ivanovitch, and
Stepan Arkadyevitch were sitting at Levin’s. Having
inquired after Kitty, they had dropped into conversation
upon other subjects. Levin heard them, and unconsciously,
as they talked, going over the past, over what had been up
to that morning, he thought of himself as he had been
yesterday till that point. It was as though a hundred years
had passed since then. He felt himself exalted to
unattainable heights, from which he studiously lowered
himself so as not to wound the people he was talking to.
He talked, and was all the time thinking of his wife, of her
condition now, of his son, in whose existence he tried to
school himself into believing. The whole world of
woman, which had taken for him since his marriage a new
value he had never suspected before, was now so exalted
that he could not take it in in his imagination. He heard
them talk of yesterday’s dinner at the club, and thought:
‘What is happening with her now? Is she asleep? How is
she? What is she thinking of? Is he crying, my son
Dmitri?’ And in the middle of the conversation, in the
middle of a sentence, he jumped up and went out of the
room.
‘Send me word if I can see her,’ said the prince.
‘Very well, in a minute,’ answered Levin, and without
stopping, he went to her room.
She was not asleep, she was talking gently with her
mother, making plans about the christening.
Carefully set to rights, with hair well-brushed, in a
smart little cap with some blue in it, her arms out on the
quilt, she was lying on her back. Meeting his eyes, her
eyes drew him to her. Her face, bright before, brightened
still more as he drew near her. There was the same change
in it from earthly to unearthly that is seen in the face of
the dead. But then it means farewell, here it meant
welcome. Again a rush of emotion, such as he had felt at
the moment of the child’s birth, flooded his heart. She
took his hand and asked him if he had slept. He could not
answer, and turned away, struggling with his weakness.
‘I have had a nap, Kostya!’ she said to him; ‘and I am so
comfortable now.’
She looked at him, but suddenly her expression
changed.
‘Give him to me,’ she said, hearing the baby’s cry.
‘Give him to me, Lizaveta Petrovna, and he shall look at
him.’
‘To be sure, his papa shall look at him,’ said Lizaveta
Petrovna, getting up and bringing something red, and
queer, and wriggling. ‘Wait a minute, we’ll make him tidy
first,’ and Lizaveta Petrovna laid the red wobbling thing
on the bed, began untrussing and trussing up the baby,
lifting it up and turning it over with one finger and
powdering it with something.
Levin, looking at the tiny, pitiful creature, made
strenuous efforts to discover in his heart some traces of
fatherly feeling for it. He felt nothing towards it but
disgust. But when it was undressed and he caught a
glimpse of wee, wee, little hands, little feet, saffroncolored,
with little toes, too, and positively with a little big
toe different from the rest, and when he saw Lizaveta
Petrovna closing the wide-open little hands, as though
they were soft springs, and putting them into linen
garments, such pity for the little creature came upon him,
and such terror that she would hurt it, that he held her
hand back.
Lizaveta Petrovna laughed.
‘Don’t be frightened, don’t be frightened!’
When the baby had been put to rights and transformed
into a firm doll, Lizaveta Petrovna dandled it as though
proud of her handiwork, and stood a little away so that
Levin might see his son in all his glory.
Kitty looked sideways in the same direction, never
taking her eyes off the baby. ‘Give him to me! give him to
me!’ she said, and even made as though she would sit up.
‘What are you thinking of, Katerina Alexandrovna, you
mustn’t move like that! Wait a minute. I’ll give him to
you. Here we’re showing papa what a fine fellow we are!’
And Lizaveta Petrovna, with one hand supporting the
wobbling head, lifted up on the other arm the strange,
limp, red creature, whose head was lost in its swaddling
clothes. But it had a nose, too, and slanting eyes and
smacking lips.
‘A splendid baby!’ said Lizaveta Petrovna.
Levin sighed with mortification. This splendid baby
excited in him no feeling but disgust and compassion. It
was not at all the feeling he had looked forward to.
He turned away while Lizaveta Petrovna put the baby
to the unaccustomed breast.
Suddenly laughter made him look round. The baby had
taken the breast.
‘Come, that’s enough, that’s enough!’ said Lizaveta
Petrovna, but Kitty would not let the baby go. He fell
asleep in her arms.
‘Look, now,’ said Kitty, turning the baby so that he
could see it. The aged-looking little face suddenly
puckered up still more and the baby sneezed.
Smiling, hardly able to restrain his tears, Levin kissed
his wife and went out of the dark room. What he felt
towards this little creature was utterly unlike what he had
expected. There was nothing cheerful and joyous in the
feeling; on the contrary, it was a new torture of
apprehension. It was the consciousness of a new sphere of
liability to pain. And this sense was so painful at first, the
apprehension lest this helpless creature should suffer was so
intense, that it prevented him from noticing the strange
thrill of senseless joy and even pride that he had felt when
the baby sneezed.
Chapter 17
Stepan Arkadyevitch’s affairs were in a very bad way.
The money for two-thirds of the forest had all been
spent already, and he had borrowed from the merchant in
advance at ten per cent discount, almost all the remaining
third. The merchant would not give more, especially as
Darya Alexandrovna, for the first time that winter insisting
on her right to her own property, had refused to sign the
receipt for the payment of the last third of the forest. All
his salary went on household expenses and in payment of
petty debts that could not be put off. There was positively
no money.
This was unpleasant and awkward, and in Stepan
Arkadyevitch’s opinion things could not go on like this.
The explanation of the position was, in his view, to be
found in the fact that his salary was too small. The post he
filled had been unmistakably very good five years ago, but
it was so no longer.
Petrov, the bank director, had twelve thousand;
Sventitsky, a company director, had seventeen thousand;
Mitin, who had founded a bank, received fifty thousand.
‘Clearly I’ve been napping, and they’ve overlooked
me,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch thought about himself. And he
began keeping his eyes and ears open, and towards the end
of the winter he had discovered a very good berth and had
formed a plan of attack upon it, at first from Moscow
through aunts, uncles, and friends, and then, when the
matter was well advanced, in the spring, he went himself
to Petersburg. It was one of those snug, lucrative berths of
which there are so many more nowadays than there used
to be, with incomes ranging from one thousand to fifty
thousand roubles. It was the post of secretary of the
committee of the amalgamated agency of the southern
railways, and of certain banking companies. This position,
like all such appointments, called for such immense energy
and such varied qualifications, that it was difficult for them
to be found united in any one man. And since a man
combining all the qualifications was not to be found, it
was at least better that the post be filled by an honest than
by a dishonest man. And Stepan Arkadyevitch was not
merely an honest man—unemphatically—in the common
acceptation of the words, he was an honest man—
emphatically—in that special sense which the word has in
Moscow, when they talk of an ‘honest’ politician, an
‘honest’ writer, an ‘honest’ newspaper, an ‘honest’
institution, an ‘honest’ tendency, meaning not simply that
the man or the institution is not dishonest, but that they
are capable on occasion of taking a line of their own in
opposition to the authorities.
Stepan Arkadyevitch moved in those circles in Moscow
in which that expression had come into use, was regarded
there as an honest man, and so had more right to this
appointment than others.
The appointment yielded an income of from seven to
ten thousand a year, and Oblonsky could fill it without
giving up his government position. It was in the hands of
two ministers, one lady, and two Jews, and all these
people, though the way had been paved already with
them, Stepan Arkadyevitch had to see in Petersburg.
Besides this business, Stepan Arkadyevitch had promised
his sister Anna to obtain from Karenin a definite answer
on the question of divorce. And begging fifty roubles from
Dolly, he set off for Petersburg.
Stepan Arkadyevitch sat in Karenin’s study listening to
his report on the causes of the unsatisfactory position of
Russian finance, and only waiting for the moment when
he would finish to speak about his own business or about
Anna.
‘Yes, that’s very true,’ he said, when Alexey
Alexandrovitch took off the pince-nez, without which he
could not read now, and looked inquiringly at his former
brother-in-law, ‘that’s very true in particular cases, but still
the principle of our day is freedom.’
‘Yes, but I lay down another principle, embracing the
principle of freedom,’ said Alexey Alexandrovitch, with
emphasis on the word ‘embracing,’ and he put on his
pince-nez again, so as to read the passage in which this
statement was made. And turning over the beautifully
written, wide-margined manuscript, Alexey
Alexandrovitch read aloud over again the conclusive
passage.
‘I don’t advocate protection for the sake of private
interests, but for the public weal, and for the lower and
upper classes equally,’ he said, looking over his pince-nez
at Oblonsky. ‘But THEY cannot grasp that, THEY are
taken up now with personal interests, and carried away by
phrases.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch knew that when Karenin began to
talk of what THEY were doing and thinking, the persons
who would not accept his report and were the cause of
everything wrong in Russia, that it was coming near the
end. And so now he eagerly abandoned the principle of
free-trade, and fully agreed. Alexey Alexandrovitch
paused, thoughtfully turning over the pages of his
manuscript.
‘Oh, by the way,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, ‘I wanted
to ask you, some time when you see Pomorsky, to drop
him a hint that I should be very glad to get that new
appointment of secretary of the committee of the
amalgamated agency of the southern railways and banking
companies.’ Stepan Arkadyevitch was familiar by now
with the title of the post he coveted, and he brought it out
rapidly without mistake.
Alexey Alexandrovitch questioned him as to the duties
of this new committee, and pondered. He was considering
whether the new committee would not be acting in some
way contrary to the views he had been advocating. But as
the influence of the new committee was of a very
complex nature, and his views were of very wide
application, he could not decide this straight off, and
taking off his pince-nez, he said:
‘Of course, I can mention it to him; but what is your
reason precisely for wishing to obtain the appointment?’
‘It’s a good salary, rising to nine thousand, and my
means..’
‘Nine thousand!’ repeated Alexey Alexandrovitch, and
he frowned. The high figure of the salary made him reflect
that on that side Stepan Arkadyevitch’s proposed position
ran counter to the main tendency of his own projects of
reform, which always leaned towards economy.
‘I consider, and I have embodied my views in a note
on the subject, that in our day these immense salaries are
evidence of the unsound economic assiette of our
finances.’
‘But what’s to be done?’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Suppose a bank director gets ten thousand—well, he’s
worth it; or an engineer gets twenty thousand—after all,
it’s a growing thing, you know!’
‘I assume that a salary is the price paid for a
commodity, and it ought to conform with the law of
supply and demand. If the salary is fixed without any
regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see two
engineers leaving college together, both equally well
trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while
the other is satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and
hussars, having no special qualifications, appointed
directors of banking companies with immense salaries, I
conclude that the salary is not fixed in accordance with the
law of supply and demand, but simply through personal
interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself, and
one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I
consider..’
Stepan Arkadyevitch made haste to interrupt his
brother-in-law.
‘Yes; but you must agree that it’s a new institution of
undoubted utility that’s being started. After all, you know,
it’s a growing thing! What they lay particular stress on is
the thing being carried on honestly,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch with emphasis.
But the Moscow significance of the word ‘honest’ was
lost on Alexey Alexandrovitch.
‘Honesty is only a negative qualification,’ he said.
‘Well, you’ll do me a great service, anyway,’ said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, ‘by putting in a word to
Pomorsky—just in the way of conversation...’
‘But I fancy it’s more in Volgarinov’s hands,’ said
Alexey Alexandrovitch.
‘Volgarinov has fully assented, as far as he’s concerned,’
said Stepan Arkadyevitch, turning red. Stepan
Arkadyevitch reddened at the mention of that name,
because he had been that morning at the Jew Volgarinov’s,
and the visit had left an unpleasant recollection.
Stepan Arkadyevitch believed most positively that the
committee in which he was trying to get an appointment
was a new, genuine, and honest public body, but that
morning when Volgarinov had— intentionally, beyond a
doubt—kept him two hours waiting with other petitioners
in his waiting room, he had suddenly felt uneasy.
Whether he was uncomfortable that he, a descendant of
Rurik, Prince Oblonsky, had been kept for two hours
waiting to see a Jew, or that for the first time in his life he
was not following the example of his ancestors in serving
the government, but was turning off into a new career,
anyway he was very uncomfortable. During those two
hours in Volgarinov’s waiting room Stepan Arkadyevitch,
stepping jauntily about the room, pulling his whiskers,
entering into conversation with the other petitioners, and
inventing an epigram on his position, assiduously
concealed from others, and even from himself, the feeling
he was experiencing.
But all the time he was uncomfortable and angry, he
could not have said why—whether because he could not
get his epigram just right, or from some other reason.
When at last Volgarinov had received him with
exaggerated politeness and unmistakable triumph at his
humiliation, and had all but refused the favor asked of
him, Stepan Arkadyevitch had made haste to forget it all as
soon as possible. And now, at the mere recollection, he
blushed.
Chapter 18
‘Now there is something I want to talk about, and you
know what it is. About Anna,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch said,
pausing for a brief space, and shaking off the unpleasant
impression.
As soon as Oblonsky uttered Anna’s name, the face of
Alexey Alexandrovitch was completely transformed; all the
life was gone out of it, and it looked weary and dead.
‘What is it exactly that you want from me?’ he said,
moving in his chair and snapping his pince-nez.
‘A definite settlement, Alexey Alexandrovitch, some
settlement of the position. I’m appealing to you’ ("not as
an injured husband,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch was going to
say, but afraid of wrecking his negotiation by this, he
changed the words) ‘not as a statesman’ (which did not
sound a propos), ‘but simply as a man, and a good-hearted
man and a Christian. You must have pity on her,’ he said.
‘That is, in what way precisely?’ Karenin said softly.
‘Yes, pity on her. If you had seen her as I have!—I
have been spending all the winter with her—you would
have pity on her. Her position is awful, simply awful!’
‘I had imagined,’ answered Alexey Alexandrovitch in a
higher, almost shrill voice, ‘that Anna Arkadyevna had
everything she had desired for herself.’
‘Oh, Alexey Alexandrovitch, for heaven’s sake, don’t
let us indulge in recriminations! What is past is past, and
you know what she wants and is waiting for—divorce.’
‘But I believe Anna Arkadyevna refuses a divorce, if I
make it a condition to leave me my son. I replied in that
sense, and supposed that the matter was ended. I consider
it at an end,’ shrieked Alexey Alexandrovitch.
‘But, for heaven’s sake, don’t get hot!’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, touching his brother-in-law’s knee. ‘The
matter is not ended. If you will allow me to recapitulate, it
was like this: when you parted, you were as magnanimous
as could possibly be; you were ready to give her
everything—freedom, divorce even. She appreciated that.
No, don’t think that. She did appreciate it—to such a
degree that at the first moment, feeling how she had
wronged you, she did not consider and could not consider
everything. She gave up everything. But experience, time,
have shown that her position is unbearable, impossible.’
‘The life of Anna Arkadyevna can have no interest for
me,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch put in, lifting his eyebrows.
‘Allow me to disbelieve that,’ Stepan Arkadyevitch
replied gently. ‘Her position is intolerable for her, and of
no benefit to anyone whatever. She has deserved it, you
will say. She knows that and asks you for nothing; she says
plainly that she dare not ask you. But I, all of us, her
relatives, all who love her, beg you, entreat you. Why
should she suffer? Who is any the better for it?’
‘Excuse me, you seem to put me in the position of the
guilty party,’ observed Alexey Alexandrovitch.
‘Oh, no, oh, no, not at all! please understand me,’ said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, touching his hand again, as though
feeling sure this physical contact would soften his brotherin-
law. ‘All I say is this: her position is intolerable, and it
might be alleviated by you, and you will lose nothing by
it. I will arrange it all for you, so that you’ll not notice it.
You did promise it, you know.’
‘The promise was given before. And I had supposed
that the question of my son had settled the matter. Besides,
I had hoped that Anna Arkadyevna had enough
generosity...’ Alexey Alexandrovitch articulated with
difficulty, his lips twitching and his face white.
‘She leaves it all to your generosity. She begs, she
implores one thing of you—to extricate her from the
impossible position in which she is placed. She does not
ask for her son now. Alexey Alexandrovitch, you are a
good man. Put yourself in her position for a minute. The
question of divorce for her in her position is a question of
life and death. If you had not promised it once, she would
have reconciled herself to her position, she would have
gone on living in the country. But you promised it, and
she wrote to you, and moved to Moscow. And here she’s
been for six months in Moscow, where every chance
meeting cuts her to the heart, every day expecting an
answer. Why, it’s like keeping a condemned criminal for
six months with the rope round his neck, promising him
perhaps death, perhaps mercy. Have pity on her, and I will
undertake to arrange everything. Vos scrupules..’
‘I am not talking about that, about that...’ Alexey
Alexandrovitch interrupted with disgust. ‘But, perhaps, I
promised what I had no right to promise.’
‘So you go back from your promise?’
‘I have never refused to do all that is possible, but I
want time to consider how much of what I promised is
possible.’
‘No, Alexey Alexandrovitch!’ cried Oblonsky, jumping
up, ‘I won’t believe that! She’s unhappy as only an
unhappy woman can be, and you cannot refuse in such..’
‘As much of what I promised as is possible. Vous
professez d’etre libre penseur. But I as a believer cannot, in
a matter of such gravity, act in opposition to the Christian
law.’
‘But in Christian societies and among us, as far as I’m
aware, divorce is allowed,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Divorce is sanctioned even by our church. And we see..’
‘It is allowed, but not in the sense..’
‘Alexey Alexandrovitch, you are not like yourself,’ said
Oblonsky, after a brief pause. ‘Wasn’t it you (and didn’t
we all appreciate it in you?) who forgave everything, and
moved simply by Christian feeling was ready to make any
sacrifice? You said yourself: if a man take thy coat, give
him thy cloak also, and now..’
‘I beg,’ said Alexey Alexandrovitch shrilly, getting
suddenly onto his feet, his face white and his jaws
twitching, ‘I beg you to drop this...to drop...this subject!’
‘Oh, no! Oh, forgive me, forgive me if I have
wounded you,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, holding out his
hand with a smile of embarrassment; ‘but like a messenger
I have simply performed the commission given me.’
Alexey Alexandrovitch gave him his hand, pondered a
little, and said:
‘I must think it over and seek for guidance. The day
after tomorrow I will give you a final answer,’ he said,
after considering a moment.
Chapter 19
Stepan Arkadyevitch was about to go away when
Korney came in to announce:
‘Sergey Alexyevitch!’
‘Who’s Sergey Alexyevitch?’ Stepan Arkadyevitch was
beginning, but he remembered immediately.
‘Ah, Seryozha!’ he said aloud. ‘Sergey Alexeitch! I
thought it was the director of a department. Anna asked
me to see him too,’ he thought.
And he recalled the timid, piteous expression with
which Anna had said to him at parting: ‘Anyway, you will
see him. Find out exactly where he is, who is looking after
him. And Stiva...if it were possible! Could it be possible?’
Stepan Arkadyevitch knew what was meant by that ‘if it
were possible,’—if it were possible to arrange the divorce
so as to let her have her son.... Stepan Arkadyevitch saw
now that it was no good to dream of that, but still he was
glad to see his nephew.
Alexey Alexandrovitch reminded his brother-in-law
that they never spoke to the boy of his mother, and he
begged him not to mention a single word about her.
‘He was very ill after that interview with his mother,
which we had not foreseen,’ said Alexey Alexandrovitch.
‘Ideed, we feared for his life. But with rational treatment,
and sea-bathing in the summer, he regained his strength,
and now, by the doctor’s advice, I have let him go to
school. And certainly the companionship of school has had
a good effect on him, and he is perfectly well, and making
good progress.’
‘What a fine fellow he’s grown! He’s not Seryozha
now, but quite full-fledged Sergey Alexeitch!’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, smiling, as he looked at the handsome,
broad-shouldered lad in blue coat and long trousers, who
walked in alertly and confidently. The boy looked healthy
and good-humored. He bowed to his uncle as to a
stranger, but recognizing him, he blushed and turned
hurriedly away from him, as though offended and irritated
at something. The boy went up to his father and handed
him a note of the marks he had gained in school.
‘Well, that’s very fair,’ said his father, ‘you can go.’
‘He’s thinner and taller, and has grown out of being a
child into a boy; I like that,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Do you remember me?’
The boy looked back quickly at his uncle.
‘Yes, mon oncle,’ he answered, glancing at his father,
and again he looked downcast.
His uncle called him to him, and took his hand.
‘Well, and how are you getting on?’ he said, wanting to
talk to him, and not knowing what to say.
The boy, blushing and making no answer, cautiously
drew his hand away. As soon as Stepan Arkadyevitch let
go his hand, he glanced doubtfully at his father, and like a
bird set free, he darted out of the room.
A year had passed since the last time Seryozha had seen
his mother. Since then he had heard nothing more of her.
And in the course of that year he had gone to school, and
made friends among his schoolfellows. The dreams and
memories of his mother, which had made him ill after
seeing her, did not occupy his thoughts now. When they
came back to him, he studiously drove them away,
regarding them as shameful and girlish, below the dignity
of a boy and a schoolboy. He knew that his father and
mother were separated by some quarrel, he knew that he
had to remain with his father, and he tried to get used to
that idea.
He disliked seeing his uncle, so like his mother, for it
called up those memories of which he was ashamed. He
disliked it all the more as from some words he had caught
as he waited at the study door, and still more from the
faces of his father and uncle, he guessed that they must
have been talking of his mother. And to avoid
condemning the father with whom he lived and on whom
he was dependent, and, above all, to avoid giving way to
sentimentality, which he considered so degrading,
Seryozha tried not to look at his uncle who had come to
disturb his peace of mind, and not to think of what he
recalled to him.
But when Stepan Arkadyevitch, going out after him,
saw him on the stairs, and calling to him, asked him how
he spent his playtime at school, Seryozha talked more
freely to him away from his father’s presence.
‘We have a railway now,’ he said in answer to his
uncle’s question. ‘It’s like this, do you see: two sit on a
bench— they’re the passengers; and one stands up straight
on the bench. And all are harnessed to it by their arms or
by their belts, and they run through all the rooms—the
doors are left open beforehand. Well, and it’s pretty hard
work being the conductor!’
‘That’s the one that stands?’ Stepan Arkadyevitch
inquired, smiling.
‘Yes, you want pluck for it, and cleverness too,
especially when they stop all of a sudden, or someone falls
down.’
‘Yes, that must be a serious matter,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, watching with mournful interest the eager
eyes, like his mother’s; not childish now—no longer fully
innocent. And though he had promised Alexey
Alexandrovitch not to speak of Anna, he could not
restrain himself.
‘Do you remember your mother?’ he asked suddenly.
‘No, I don’t,’ Seryozha said quickly. He blushed
crimson, and his face clouded over. And his uncle could
get nothing more out of him. His tutor found his pupil on
the staircase half an hour later, and for a long while he
could not make out whether he was ill-tempered or
crying.
‘What is it? I expect you hurt yourself when you fell
down?’ said the tutor. ‘I told you it was a dangerous game.
And we shall have to speak to the director.’
‘If I had hurt myself, nobody should have found it out,
that’s certain.’
‘Well, what is it, then?’
‘Leave me alone! If I remember, or if I don’t
remember?...what business is it of his? Why should I
remember? Leave me in peace!’ he said, addressing not his
tutor, but the whole world.
Chapter 20
Stepan Arkadyevitch, as usual, did not waste his time in
Petersburg. In Petersburg, besides business, his sister’s
divorce, and his coveted appointment, he wanted, as he
always did, to freshen himself up, as he said, after the
mustiness of Moscow.
In spite of its cafes chantants and its omnibuses,
Moscow was yet a stagnant bog. Stepan Arkadyevitch
always felt it. After living for some time in Moscow,
especially in close relations with his family, he was
conscious of a depression of spirits. After being a long time
in Moscow without a change, he reached a point when he
positively began to be worrying himself over his wife’s illhumor
and reproaches, over his children’s health and
education, and the petty details of his official work; even
the fact of being in debt worried him. But he had only to
go and stay a little while in Petersburg, in the circle there
in which he moved, where people lived—really lived—
instead of vegetating as in Moscow, and all such ideas
vanished and melted away at once, like wax before the
fire. His wife?... Only that day he had been talking to
Prince Tchetchensky. Prince Tchetchensky had a wife and
family, grown-up pages in the corps,...and he had another
illegitimate family of children also. Though the first family
was very nice too, Prince Tchetchensky felt happier in his
second family; and he used to take his eldest son with him
to his second family, and told Stepan Arkadyevitch that he
thought it good for his son, enlarging his ideas. What
would have been said to that in Moscow?
His children? In Petersburg children did not prevent
their parents from enjoying life. The children were
brought up in schools, and there was no trace of the wild
idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov’s household, for
instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the children,
while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety.
Here people understood that a man is in duty bound to
live for himself, as every man of culture should live.
His official duties? Official work here was not the stiff,
hopeless drudgery that it was in Moscow. Here there was
some interest in official life. A chance meeting, a service
rendered, a happy phrase, a knack of facetious mimicry,
and a man’s career might be made in a trice. So it had
been with Bryantsev, whom Stepan Arkadyevitch had met
the previous day, and who was one of the highest
functionaries in government now. There was some
interest in official work like that.
The Petersburg attitude on pecuniary matters had an
especially soothing effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch.
Bartnyansky, who must spend at least fifty thousand to
judge by the style he lived in, had made an interesting
comment the day before on that subject.
As they were talking before dinner, Stepan
Arkadyevitch said to Bartnyansky:
‘You’re friendly, I fancy, with Mordvinsky; you might
do me a favor: say a word to him, please, for me. There’s
an appointment I should like to get—secretary of the
agency..’
‘Oh, I shan’t remember all that, if you tell it to me....
But what possesses you to have to do with railways and
Jews?... Take it as you will, it’s a low business.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch did not say to Bartnyansky that it
was a ‘growing thing’—Bartnyansky would not have
understood that.
‘I want the money, I’ve nothing to live on.’
‘You’re living, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but in debt.’
‘Are you, though? Heavily?’ said Bartnyansky
sympathetically.
‘Very heavily: twenty thousand.’
Bartnyansky broke into good-humored laughter.
‘Oh, lucky fellow!’ said he. ‘My debts mount up to a
million and a half, and I’ve nothing, and still I can live, as
you see!’
And Stepan Arkadyevitch saw the correctness of this
view not in words only but in actual fact. Zhivahov owed
three hundred thousand, and hadn’t a farthing to bless
himself with, and he lived, and in style too! Count
Krivtsov was considered a hopeless case by everyone, and
yet he kept two mistresses. Petrovsky had run through five
millions, and still lived in just the same style, and was even
a manager in the financial department with a salary of
twenty thousand. But besides this, Petersburg had
physically an agreeable effect on Stepan Arkadyevitch. It
made him younger. In Moscow he sometimes found a
gray hair in his head, dropped asleep after dinner,
stretched, walked slowly upstairs, breathing heavily, was
bored by the society of young women, and did not dance
at balls. In Petersburg he always felt ten years younger.
His experience in Petersburg was exactly what had
been described to him on the previous day by Prince
Pyotr Oblonsky, a man of sixty, who had just come back
from abroad:
‘We don’t know the way to live here,’ said Pyotr
Oblonsky. ‘I spent the summer in Baden, and you
wouldn’t believe it, I felt quite a young man. At a glimpse
of a pretty woman, my thoughts.... One dines and drinks a
glass of wine, and feels strong and ready for anything. I
came home to Russia—had to see my wife, and, what’s
more, go to my country place; and there, you’d hardly
believe it, in a fortnight I’d got into a dressing gown and
given up dressing for dinner. Needn’t say I had no
thoughts left for pretty women. I became quite an old
gentleman. There was nothing left for me but to think of
my eternal salvation. I went off to Paris—I was as right as
could be at once.’
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt exactly the difference that
Pyotr Oblonsky described. In Moscow he degenerated so
much that if he had had to be there for long together, he
might in good earnest have come to considering his
salvation; in Petersburg he felt himself a man of the world
again.
Between Princess Betsy Tverskaya and Stepan
Arkadyevitch there had long existed rather curious
relations. Stepan Arkadyevitch always flirted with her in
jest, and used to say to her, also in jest, the most unseemly
things, knowing that nothing delighted her so much. The
day after his conversation with Karenin, Stepan
Arkadyevitch went to see her, and felt so youthful that in
this jesting flirtation and nonsense he recklessly went so far
that he did not know how to extricate himself, as
unluckily he was so far from being attracted by her that he
thought her positively disagreeable. What made it hard to
change the conversation was the fact that he was very
attractive to her. So that he was considerably relieved at
the arrival of Princess Myakaya, which cut short their tetea-
tete.
‘Ah, so you’re here!’ said she when she saw him. ‘Well,
and what news of your poor sister? You needn’t look at
me like that,’ she added. ‘Ever since they’ve all turned
against her, all those who’re a thousand times worse than
she, I’ve thought she did a very fine thing. I can’t forgive
Vronsky for not letting me know when she was in
Petersburg. I’d have gone to see her and gone about with
her everywhere. Please give her my love. Come, tell me
about her.’
‘Yes, her position is very difficult; she...’ began Stepan
Arkadyevitch, in the simplicity of his heart accepting as
sterling coin Princess Myakaya’s words ‘tell me about her.’
Princess Myakaya interrupted him immediately, as she
always did, and began talking herself.
‘She’s done what they all do, except me—only they
hide it. But she wouldn’t be deceitful, and she did a fine
thing. And she did better still in throwing up that crazy
brother-in-law of yours. You must excuse me. Everybody
used to say he was so clever, so very clever; I was the only
one that said he was a fool. Now that he’s so thick with
Lidia Ivanovna and Landau, they all say he’s crazy, and I
should prefer not to agree with everybody, but this time I
can’t help it.’
‘Oh, do please explain,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch;
‘what does it mean? Yesterday I was seeing him on my
sister’s behalf, and I asked him to give me a final answer.
He gave me no answer, and said he would think it over.
But this morning, instead of an answer, I received an
invitation from Countess Lidia Ivanovna for this evening.’
‘Ah, so that’s it, that’s it!’ said Princess Myakaya
gleefully, ‘they’re going to ask Landau what he’s to say.’
‘Ask Landau? What for? Who or what’s Landau?’
‘What! you don’t know Jules Landau, le fameux Jules
Landau, le clairvoyant? He’s crazy too, but on him your
sister’s fate depends. See what comes of living in the
provinces—you know nothing about anything. Landau,
do you see, was a commis in a shop in Paris, and he went
to a doctor’s; and in the doctor’s waiting room he fell
asleep, and in his sleep he began giving advice to all the
patients. And wonderful advice it was! Then the wife of
Yury Meledinsky—you know, the invalid?—heard of this
Landau, and had him to see her husband. And he cured
her husband, though I can’t say that I see he did him
much good, for he’s just as feeble a creature as ever he
was, but they believed in him, and took him along with
them and brought him to Russia. Here there’s been a
general rush to him, and he’s begun doctoring everyone.
He cured Countess Bezzubova, and she took such a fancy
to him that she adopted him.’
‘Adopted him?’
‘Yes, as her son. He’s not Landau any more now, but
Count Bezzubov. That’s neither here nor there, though;
but Lidia—I’m very fond of her, but she has a screw loose
somewhere—has lost her heart to this Landau now, and
nothing is settled now in her house or Alexey
Alexandrovitch’s without him, and so your sister’s fate is
now in the hands of Landau, alias Count Bezzubov.’
Chapter 21
After a capital dinner and a great deal of cognac drunk
at Bartnyansky’s, Stepan Arkadyevitch, only a little later
than the appointed time, went in to Countess Lidia
Ivanovna’s.
‘Who else is with the countess?—a Frenchman?’ Stepan
Arkadyevitch asked the hall porter, as he glanced at the
familiar overcoat of Alexey Alexandrovitch and a queer,
rather artless-looking overcoat with clasps.
‘Alexey Alexandrovitch Karenin and Count Bezzubov,’
the porter answered severely.
‘Princess Myakaya guessed right,’ thought Stepan
Arkadyevitch, as he went upstairs. ‘Curious! It would be
quite as well, though, to get on friendly terms with her.
She has immense influence. If she would say a word to
Pomorsky, the thing would be a certainty.’
It was still quite light out-of-doors, but in Countess
Lidia Ivanovna’s little drawing room the blinds were
drawn and the lamps lighted. At a round table under a
lamp sat the countess and Alexey Alexandrovitch, talking
softly. A short, thinnish man, very pale and handsome,
with feminine hips and knock-kneed legs, with fine
Anna Karenina
1578 of 1759
brilliant eyes and long hair lying on the collar of his coat,
was standing at the end of the room gazing at the portraits
on the wall. After greeting the lady of the house and
Alexey Alexandrovitch, Stepan Arkadyevitch could not
resist glancing once more at the unknown man.
‘Monsieur Landau!’ the countess addressed him with a
softness and caution that impressed Oblonsky. And she
introduced them.
Landau looked round hurriedly, came up, and smiling,
laid his moist, lifeless hand in Stepan Arkadyevitch’s
outstretched hand and immediately walked away and fell
to gazing at the portraits again. The countess and Alexey
Alexandrovitch looked at each other significantly.
‘I am very glad to see you, particularly today,’ said
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, pointing Stepan Arkadyevitch to
a seat beside Karenin.
‘I introduced you to him as Landau,’ she said in a soft
voice, glancing at the Frenchman and again immediately
after at Alexey Alexandrovitch, ‘but he is really Count
Bezzubov, as you’re probably aware. Only he does not
like the title.’
‘Yes, I heard so,’ answered Stepan Arkadyevitch; ‘they
say he completely cured Countess Bezzubova.’
Anna Karenina
1579 of 1759
‘She was here today, poor thing!’ the countess said,
turning to Alexey Alexandrovitch. ‘This separation is
awful for her. It’s such a blow to her!’
‘And he positively is going?’ queried Alexey
Alexandrovitch.
‘Yes, he’s going to Paris. He heard a voice yesterday,’
said Countess Lidia Ivanovna, looking at Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
‘Ah, a voice!’ repeated Oblonsky, feeling that he must
be as circumspect as he possibly could in this society,
where something peculiar was going on, or was to go on,
to which he had not the key.
A moment’s silence followed, after which Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, as though approaching the main topic of
conversation, said with a fine smile to Oblonsky:
‘I’ve known you for a long while, and am very glad to
make a closer acquaintance with you. Les amis de nos amis
sont nos amis. But to be a true friend, one must enter into
the spiritual state of one’s friend, and I fear that you are
not doing so in the case of Alexey Alexandrovitch. You
understand what I mean?’ she said, lifting her fine pensive
eyes.
‘In part, countess, I understand the position of Alexey
Alexandrovitch...’ said Oblonsky. Having no clear idea
Anna Karenina
1580 of 1759
what they were talking about, he wanted to confine
himself to generalities.
‘The change is not in his external position,’ Countess
Lidia Ivanovna said sternly, following with eyes of love the
figure of Alexey Alexandrovitch as he got up and crossed
over to Landau; ‘his heart is changed, a new heart has been
vouchsafed him, and I fear you don’t fully apprehend the
change that has taken place in him.’
‘Oh, well, in general outlines I can conceive the
change. We have always been friendly, and now...’ said
Stepan Arkadyevitch, responding with a sympathetic
glance to the expression of the countess, and mentally
balancing the question with which of the two ministers
she was most intimate, so as to know about which to ask
her to speak for him.
‘The change that has taken place in him cannot lessen
his love for his neighbors; on the contrary, that change can
only intensify love in his heart. But I am afraid you do not
understand me. Won’t you have some tea?’ she said, with
her eyes indicating the footman, who was handing round
tea on a tray.
‘Not quite, countess. Of course, his misfortune..’
‘Yes, a misfortune which has proved the highest
happiness, when his heart was made new, was filled full of
it,’ she said, gazing with eyes full of love at Stepan
Arkadyevitch.
‘I do believe I might ask her to speak to both of them,’
thought Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘Oh, of course, countess,’ he said; ‘but I imagine such
changes are a matter so private that no one, even the most
intimate friend, would care to speak of them.’
‘On the contrary! We ought to speak freely and help
one another.’
‘Yes, undoubtedly so, but there is such a difference of
convictions, and besides...’ said Oblonsky with a soft
smile.
‘There can be no difference where it is a question of
holy truth.’
‘Oh, no, of course; but...’ and Stepan Arkadyevitch
paused in confusion. He understood at last that they were
talking of religion.
‘I fancy he will fall asleep immediately,’ said Alexey
Alexandrovitch in a whisper full of meaning, going up to
Lidia Ivanovna.
Stepan Arkadyevitch looked round. Landau was sitting
at the window, leaning on his elbow and the back of his
chair, his head drooping. Noticing that all eyes were
turned on him he raised his head and smiled a smile of
childlike artlessness.
‘Don’t take any notice,’ said Lidia Ivanovna, and she
lightly moved a chair up for Alexey Alexandrovitch. ‘I
have observed...’ she was beginning, when a footman
came into the room with a letter. Lidia Ivanovna rapidly
ran her eyes over the note, and excusing herself, wrote an
answer with extraordinary rapidity, handed it to the man,
and came back to the table. ‘I have observed,’ she went
on, ‘that Moscow people, especially the men, are more
indifferent to religion than anyone.’
‘Oh, no, countess, I thought Moscow people had the
reputation of being the firmest in the faith,’ answered
Stepan Arkadyevitch.
‘But as far as I can make out, you are unfortunately one
of the indifferent ones,’ said Alexey Alexandrovitch,
turning to him with a weary smile.
‘How anyone can be indifferent!’ said Lidia Ivanovna.
‘I am not so much indifferent on that subject as I am
waiting in suspense,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, with his
most deprecating smile. ‘I hardly think that the time for
such questions has come yet for me.’
Alexey Alexandrovitch and Lidia Ivanovna looked at
each other.
‘We can never tell whether the time has come for us or
not,’ said Alexey Alexandrovitch severely. ‘We ought not
to think whether we are ready or not ready. God’s grace is
not guided by human considerations: sometimes it comes
not to those that strive for it, and comes to those that are
unprepared, like Saul.’
‘No, I believe it won’t be just yet,’ said Lidia Ivanovna,
who had been meanwhile watching the movements of the
Frenchman. Landau got up and came to them.
‘Do you allow me to listen?’ he asked.
‘Oh, yes; I did not want to disturb you,’ said Lidia
Ivanovna, gazing tenderly at him; ‘sit here with us.’
‘One has only not to close one’s eyes to shut out the
light,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch went on.
‘Ah, if you knew the happiness we know, feeling His
presence ever in our hearts!’ said Countess Lidia Ivanovna
with a rapturous smile.
‘But a man may feel himself unworthy sometimes to
rise to that height,’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, conscious of
hypocrisy in admitting this religious height, but at the
same time unable to bring himself to acknowledge his
free-thinking views before a person who, by a single word
to Pomorsky, might procure him the coveted
appointment.
‘That is, you mean that sin keeps him back?’ said Lidia
Ivanovna. ‘But that is a false idea. There is no sin for
believers, their sin has been atoned for. Pardon,’ she
added, looking at the footman, who came in again with
another letter. She read it and gave a verbal answer:
‘Tomorrow at the Grand Duchess’s, say.’ ‘For the believer
sin is not,’ she went on.
‘Yes, but faith without works is dead,’ said Stepan
Arkadyevitch, recalling the phrase from the catechism, and
only by his smile clinging to his independence.
‘There you have it—from the epistle of St. James,’ said
Alexey Alexandrovitch, addressing Lidia Ivanovna, with a
certain reproachfulness in his tone. It was unmistakably a
subject they had discussed more than once before. ‘What
harm has been done by the false interpretation of that
passage! Nothing holds men back from belief like that
misinterpretation. ‘I have not works, so I cannot believe,’
though all the while that is not said. But the very opposite
is said.’
‘Striving for God, saving the soul by fasting,’ said
Countess Lidia Ivanovna, with disgusted contempt, ‘those
are the crude ideas of our monks.... Yet that is nowhere
said. It is far simpler and easier,’ she added, looking at
Oblonsky with the same encouraging smile with which at
court she encouraged youthful maids of honor,
disconcerted by the new surroundings of the court.
‘We are saved by Christ who suffered for us. We are
saved by faith,’ Alexey Alexandrovitch chimed in, with a
glance of approval at her words.
‘Vous comprenez l’anglais?’ asked Lidia Ivanovna, and
receiving a reply in the affirmative, she got up and began
looking through a shelf of books.
‘I want to read him ‘Safe and Happy,’ or ‘Under the
Wing,’’ she said, looking inquiringly at Karenin. And
finding the book, and sitting down again in her place, she
opened it. ‘It’s very short. In it is described the way by
which faith can be reached, and the happiness, above all
earthly bliss, with which it fills the soul. The believer
cannot be unhappy because he is not alone. But you will
see.’ She was just settling herself to read when the footman
came in again. ‘Madame Borozdina? Tell her, tomorrow at
two o’clock. Yes,’ she said, putting her finger in the place
in the book, and gazing before her with her fine pensive
eyes, ‘that is how true faith acts. You know Marie Sanina?
You know about her trouble? She lost her only child. She
was in despair. And what happened? She found this
comforter, and she thanks God now for the death of her
child. Such is the happiness faith brings!’
‘Oh, yes, that is most...’ said Stepan Arkadyevitch, glad
they were going to read, and let him have a chance to
collect his faculties. ‘No, I see I’d better not ask her about
anything today,’ he thought. ‘If only I can get out of this
without putting my foot in it!’
‘It will be dull for you,’ said Countess Lidia Ivanovna,
addressing Landau; ‘you don’t know English, but it’s
short.’
‘Oh, I shall understand,’ said Landau, with the same
smile, and he closed his eyes. Alexey Alexandrovitch and
Lidia Ivanovna exchanged meaningful glances, and the
reading began.
Chapter 22
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt completely nonplussed by the
strange talk which he was hearing for the first time. The
complexity of Petersburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect
on him, rousing him out of his Moscow stagnation. But
he liked these complications, and understood them only in
the circles he knew and was at home in. In these
unfamiliar surroundings he was puzzled and disconcerted,
and could not get his bearings. As he listened to Countess
Lidia Ivanovna, aware of the beautiful, artless—or perhaps
artful, he could not decide which—eyes of Landau fixed
upon him, Stepan Arkadyevitch began to be conscious of a
peculiar heaviness in his head.
The most incongruous ideas were in confusion in his
head. ‘Marie Sanina is glad her child’s dead.... How good a
smoke would be now!... To be saved, one need only
believe, and the monks don’t know how the thing’s to be
done, but Countess Lidia Ivanovna does know.... And
why is my head so heavy? Is it the cognac, or all this being
so queer? Anyway, I fancy I’ve done nothing unsuitable so
far. But anyway, it won’t do to ask her now. They say
they make one say one’s prayers. I only hope they won’t
make me! That’ll be too imbecile. And what stuff it is
she’s reading! but she has a good accent. Landau—
Bezzubov— what’s he Bezzubov for?’ All at once Stepan
Arkadyevitch became aware that his lower jaw was
uncontrollably forming a yawn. He pulled his whiskers to
cover the yawn, and shook himself together. But soon
after he became aware that he was dropping asleep and on
the very point of snoring. He recovered himself at the
very moment when the voice of Countess Lidia Ivanovna
was saying ‘he’s asleep.’ Stepan Arkadyevitch started with
dismay, feeling guilty and caught. But he was reassured at
once by seeing that the words ‘he’s asleep’ referred not to
him, but to Landau. The Frenchman was asleep as well as
Stepan Arkadyevitch. But Stepan Arkadyevitch’s being
asleep would have offended them, as he thought (though
even this, he thought, might not be so, as everything
seemed so queer), while Landau’s being asleep delighted
them extremely, especially Countess Lidia Ivanovna.
‘Mon ami,’ said Lidia Ivanovna, carefully holding the
folds of her silk gown so as not to rustle, and in her
excitement calling Karenin not Alexey Alexandrovitch,
but ‘mon ami,’ ‘donnez-lui la main. Vous voyez? Sh!’ she
hissed at the footman as he came in again. ‘Not at home.’
The Frenchman was asleep, or pretending to be asleep,
with his head on the back of his chair, and his moist hand,
as it lay on his knee, made faint movements, as though
trying to catch something. Alexey Alexandrovitch got up,
tried to move carefully, but stumbled against the table,
went up and laid his hand in the Frenchman’s hand.
Stepan Arkadyevitch got up too, and opening his eyes
wide, trying to wake himself up if he were asleep, he
looked first at one and then at the other. It was all real.
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt that his head was getting worse
and worse.
‘Que la personne qui est arrivee la derniere, celle qui
demande, qu’elle sorte! Qu’elle sorte!’ articulated the
Frenchman, without opening his eyes.
‘Vous m’excuserez, mais vous voyez.... Revenez vers
dix heures, encore mieux demain.’
‘Qu’elle sorte!’ repeated the Frenchman impatiently.
‘C’est moi, n’est-ce pas?’ And receiving an answer in
the affirmative, Stepan Arkadyevitch, forgetting the favor
he had meant to ask of Lidia Ivanovna, and forgetting his
sister’s affairs, caring for nothing, but filled with the sole
desire to get away as soon as possible, went out on tiptoe
and ran out into the street as though from a plague
stricken house. For a long while he chatted and joked
with his cab-driver, trying to recover his spirits.
At the French theater where he arrived for the last act,
and afterwards at the Tatar restaurant after his champagne,
Stepan Arkadyevitch felt a little refreshed in the
atmosphere he was used to. But still he felt quite unlike
himself all that evening.
On getting home to Pyotr Oblonsky’s, where he was
staying, Stepan Arkadyevitch found a note from Betsy. She
wrote to him that she was very anxious to finish their
interrupted conversation, and begged him to come next
day. He had scarcely read this note, and frowned at its
contents, when he heard below the ponderous tramp of
the servants, carrying something heavy.
Stepan Arkadyevitch went out to look. It was the
rejuvenated Pyotr Oblonsky. He was so drunk that he
could not walk upstairs; but he told them to set him on his
legs when he saw Stepan Arkadyevitch, and clinging to
him, walked with him into his room and there began
telling him how he had spent the evening, and fell asleep
doing so.
Stepan Arkadyevitch was in very low spirits, which
happened rarely with him, and for a long while he could
not go to sleep. Everything he could recall to his mind,
everything was disgusting; but most disgusting of all, as if
it were something shameful, was the memory of the
evening he had spent at Countess Lidia Ivanovna’s.
Next day he received from Alexey Alexandrovitch a
final answer, refusing to grant Anna’s divorce, and he
understood that this decision was based on what the
Frenchman had said in his real or pretended trance.
Chapter 23
In order to carry through any undertaking in family
life, there must necessarily be either complete division
between the husband and wife, or loving agreement.
When the relations of a couple are vacillating and neither
one thing nor the other, no sort of enterprise can be
undertaken.
Many families remain for years in the same place,
though both husband and wife are sick of it, simply
because there is neither complete division nor agreement
between them.
Both Vronsky and Anna felt life in Moscow
insupportable in the heat and dust, when the spring
sunshine was followed by the glare of summer, and all the
trees in the boulevards had long since been in full leaf, and
the leaves were covered with dust. But they did not go
back to Vozdvizhenskoe, as they had arranged to do long
before; they went on staying in Moscow, though they
both loathed it, because of late there had been no
agreement between them.
The irritability that kept them apart had no external
cause, and all efforts to come to an understanding
intensified it, instead of removing it. It was an inner
irritation, grounded in her mind on the conviction that his
love had grown less; in his, on regret that he had put
himself for her sake in a difficult position, which she,
instead of lightening, made still more difficult. Neither of
them gave full utterance to their sense of grievance, but
they considered each other in the wrong, and tried on
every pretext to prove this to one another.
In her eyes the whole of him, with all his habits, ideas,
desires, with all his spiritual and physical temperament, was
one thing—love for women, and that love, she felt, ought
to be entirely concentrated on her alone. That love was
less; consequently, as she reasoned, he must have
transferred part of his love to other women or to another
woman—and she was jealous. She was jealous not of any
particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not
having got an object for her jealousy, she was on the
lookout for it. At the slightest hint she transferred her
jealousy from one object to another. At one time she was
jealous of those low women with whom he might so
easily renew his old bachelor ties; then she was jealous of
the society women he might meet; then she was jealous of
the imaginary girl whom he might want to marry, for
whose sake he would break with her. And this last form of
jealousy tortured her most of all, especially as he had
unwarily told her, in a moment of frankness, that his
mother knew him so little that she had had the audacity to
try and persuade him to marry the young Princess
Sorokina.
And being jealous of him, Anna was indignant against
him and found grounds for indignation in everything. For
everything that was difficult in her position she blamed
him. The agonizing condition of suspense she had passed
in Moscow, the tardiness and indecision of Alexey
Alexandrovitch, her solitude—she put it all down to him.
If he had loved her he would have seen all the bitterness of
her position, and would have rescued her from it. For her
being in Moscow and not in the country, he was to blame
too. He could not live buried in the country as she would
have liked to do. He must have society, and he had put
her in this awful position, the bitterness of which he
would not see. And again, it was his fault that she was
forever separated from her son.
Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from
time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she
saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had
not been of old and which exasperated her.
It was dusk. Anna was alone, and waiting for him to
come back from a bachelor dinner. She walked up and
down in his study (the room where the noise from the
street was least heard), and thought over every detail of
their yesterday’s quarrel. Going back from the wellremembered,
offensive words of the quarrel to what had
been the ground of it, she arrived at last at its origin. For a
long while she could hardly believe that their dissension
had arisen from a conversation so inoffensive, of so little
moment to either. But so it actually had been. It all arose
from his laughing at the girls’ high schools, declaring they
were useless, while she defended them. He had spoken
slightingly of women’s education in general, and had said
that Hannah, Anna’s English protegee, had not the
slightest need to know anything of physics.
This irritated Anna. She saw in this a contemptuous
reference to her occupations. And she bethought her of a
phrase to pay him back for the pain he had given her. ‘I
don’t expect you to understand me, my feelings, as anyone
who loved me might, but simple delicacy I did expect,’
she said.
And he had actually flushed with vexation, and had said
something unpleasant. She could not recall her answer, but
at that point, with an unmistakable desire to wound her
too, he had said:
‘I feel no interest in your infatuation over this girl,
that’s true, because I see it’s unnatural.’
The cruelty with which he shattered the world she had
built up for herself so laboriously to enable her to endure
her hard life, the injustice with which he had accused her
of affectation, of artificiality, aroused her.
‘I am very sorry that nothing but what’s coarse and
material is comprehensible and natural to you,’ she said
and walked out of the room.
When he had come in to her yesterday evening, they
had not referred to the quarrel, but both felt that the
quarrel had been smoothed over, but was not at an end.
Today he had not been at home all day, and she felt so
lonely and wretched in being on bad terms with him that
she wanted to forget it all, to forgive him, and be
reconciled with him; she wanted to throw the blame on
herself and to justify him.
‘I am myself to blame. I’m irritable, I’m insanely
jealous. I will make it up with him, and we’ll go away to
the country; there I shall be more at peace.’
‘Unnatural!’ she suddenly recalled the word that had
stung her most of all, not so much the word itself as the
intent to wound her with which it was said. ‘I know what
he meant; he meant— unnatural, not loving my own
daughter, to love another person’s child. What does he
know of love for children, of my love for Seryozha,
whom I’ve sacrificed for him? But that wish to wound
me! No, he loves another woman, it must be so.’
And perceiving that, while trying to regain her peace of
mind, she had gone round the same circle that she had
been round so often before, and had come back to her
former state of exasperation, she was horrified at herself.
‘Can it be impossible? Can it be beyond me to control
myself?’ she said to herself, and began again from the
beginning. ‘He’s truthful, he’s honest, he loves me. I love
him, and in a few days the divorce will come. What more
do I want? I want peace of mind and trust, and I will take
the blame on myself. Yes, now when he comes in, I will
tell him I was wrong, though I was not wrong, and we
will go away tomorrow.’
And to escape thinking any more, and being overcome
by irritability, she rang, and ordered the boxes to be
brought up for packing their things for the country.
At ten o’clock Vronsky came in.
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